Originally Posted by
Wucas
I still have to disagree with you
This was necessary when I do not wish my edges to flow like that. To create the look of "clean cut" I separated the pieces adding lighter details to the edges of each section.
(The lightness of the edge does not appear well in the MAX renders due to lighting, but if you look in the first image (the GIF) you can see that none of the edges are purely black, but yet are lightened slightly)
Another reason I separated them as such is when dealing with larger texture sizes,especially in legacy gaming engines, digital bleeding is fairly common. 2,3, even 5 pixels will be rendered incorrectly at times, thus giving the model a little breathing room never hurts.
I used over 75% of the available texture space in the unwrap here, that isn't horrible in my opinion o.o.